Wee as can be, Mary Kohut still manages to fill a room with her personality, even as she sits, just now, snuggled into a front-room armchair opposite her original, 1889 fireplace — such are the stories she spills forth about Draper St.

How Polly Iwanyszyn used to run the eccentric variety store across the way, always ready to share an in-store drink (rye, she being transplanted from the Prairies) with any neighbour who dropped by for milk or bread (“It wasn’t the cheapest, but it was local.”)

That would be in the same house-cum-store where former lieutenant-governor Lincoln Alexander was born, back in 1922.

Or the street parties, with food-laden tables and bunting and even the road itself brightly painted, like it was for the bash celebrating the Queen’s 1984 visit to Toronto, although, sadly, Her Majesty had to decline her invitation.

And the epic snowstorm 40 years earlier that pretty much paralyzed the city. (“You couldn’t open the front door. My brothers tunneled across the street.”)

She remembers it all in adoring detail, sitting in the house where she’s lived since 1938, as if mere weeks and not years had passed.

The framed photographs of family members that jam the wall across from her mark such a jumble of eras, it’s as if everything has been constantly changing, though somehow not really changing at all.

Kohut, now 86, may be the one who’s lived on Draper for the longest time, but that alone isn’t what makes her house, her ballad, so central to what Draper’s all about.

This little strip of just 28 Victorian houses near Bathurst and Front St. could well be the city’s most closely-knit micro-community — precisely because it’s endured so many surrounding upheavals (the arrival of factories back when; towering condominiums now) without ever losing its core, its heart.

Just 28 houses, so wonderfully isolated from the bustle all around that “even the cabs don’t know it,” to borrow from Bill Brokenshire, who has lived on Draper for nearly 30 years.

When the neighbours get together for their Summer Solstice party on Saturday — these days centred on the vacant lot they’ve turned into a community garden, complete with tables and chairs — the soul of Kohut’s front room will simply have shifted outside.

When Cate Freeman
came to settle in Toronto after a peripatetic life in Australia, she had some pretty firm ideas about the sort of place she wanted in a home.

It had to be south of Bloor St., for starters, and no further east than Jarvis St. “I wanted to live downtown and I wanted something that had a certain character,” she says.

That was in 1980, and she’s been on Draper ever since, a driving force whenever anything seemed to call out for a neighbourhood celebration. “Any opportunity to party was grabbed,” she smiles.

Every spring still brings the single day when everyone stages a yard sale, just as the first Saturday after the kids returned to school would bring a street party in September, though that’s been put on hold of late, in deference to the anniversary of 9/11.

This is where the spare lot comes in. It used to be occupied by two little Victorian cottages, but those were razed during World War II, eventually giving way to a little plastics factory, before being turned into a parking lot attached to the industrial properties to the east, then more or less abandoned.

“We got used to going in and gathering there,” says Freeman.

It was a bit of a mess at first, all compacted soil and gravel, but then the people living across the street were having their basement dug out. At which point Draper — and it’s hard to think of the place as anything but a collective — had an idea.

Why not just cart all that soil over to the spare lot?

Which duly happened, the soil amended as much as possible with compost. Cedar trees and a Japanese maple were moved in, along with flowers, even a vegetable patch. “Everybody started contributing plants,” says Freeman.

The land, of course, isn’t technically public. When the commercial buildings to the east are inevitably replaced with office towers or condominiums, the little vacant lot will be part of the package.

Yet the Draperites remain sanguine about their vacant lot turned community parkette. “We feel very confident we’ll have that land, because the only thing (new owners) can do with that is build an absolute replica of all these other houses,” says Freeman.

Such optimism hails from another community effort.

So unique
and relatively unchanged are the Victorian houses on Draper, despite decades of development around them, that in the late 1990s residents managed to get the entire street designated under the Ontario Heritage Act, which means pages and pages of guidelines of what can and cannot be done to properties so steeped in history.

“Dead in the battle — Dead in the field;

More than his life can a soldier yield?

His blood has burnished his sabre bright.

To his memory, honor (sic): to him, goodnight.”

These words — truncated from a poem by Elizabeth Harman — appear on one of the plaques affixed to the War of 1812 monument in Victoria Memorial Square, just around the corner from Draper.

The plinth was put up on July 1, 1902. That the poem also appears in full within the covers of a 1906 tome cheerfully entitled
Days and Deeds: A Book of Verse for Children’s Reading and Speaking
, is a kind of punctuation mark for the Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian sensibilities that long ruled everything around Draper.

Fort York is just a stone’s throw away, and the street was originally part of a 1,000-acre parcel that John Graves Simcoe reserved for the military in 1794, the same year his 15-month-old daughter, Katherine, was buried in the cemetery that would eventually become Victoria Memorial Square.

The survey posts marking that cemetery were set out by a young Sandford Fleming, who’d later rise to knighted prominence as the chief engineer of Canada’s first transcontinental railway and inventor of modern-day time zones.

It’s the kind of place where you touch history with every step.

Time was, whenever a relative or friend visited someone on Draper, they’d duly be trooped in one of two directions for a photograph.

One option was to head west along Wellington St., past the Copp-Clark building whose ivy-covered east wall still shades and shelters backyards on the west side of Draper, to the war memorial.

The other, much preferred by Kohut, was to venture east to the flower gardens in front of Willards Chocolates Ltd., whose factory used to flank backyards on the east side of Draper.

Some happy familiarity, after all, was also at play, since in Kohut’s youth all the kids on the street used to flock to the Willards watchman, with his basket of broken or damaged chocolates to hand out, gratis, though that didn’t stop some children from trying (unsuccessfully) to clamber through the factory windows for a bigger haul.

There’s a reason Kohut’s eyes still light up at the name “Sweet Marie.”

It didn’t take
long for the growing city to swallow nearly all of the 1,000 acres set aside by Simcoe. By 1855, Draper was already showing up on city plans, named after the Hon. William Henry Draper.

Born outside London, England, in 1801, he’d arrived in York (now Toronto) in 1820 and seems to have had a knack for impressing all the right people at the earliest opportunity. He was taken into the law office of John Beverley Robinson, and became so noted for his eloquence, his sheer persuasive presence as a barrister and Tory politician, that he was duly dubbed “Sweet William.”

By 1863, he was chief justice of Upper Canada.

But the present-day houses of Draper didn’t appear until later, built in four phases between 1881 and 1889.

The signature look of the street revolves around rows of 1.5-storey Second Empire-style cottages, with bays on the main floor and mansard roofs, originally lined at the top with metal fretwork.

Later homes were the bay-and-gables so typical of Toronto, 2.5 storeys in a localized version of what’s loosely known as the Queen Anne style — a late-19th-century fad that harkened back to early-18th-century England.

Those styles lend themselves to intimacy with the neighbours, but so did something else.

When Draper was laid out, the road allowance was just half a chain, or 33 feet — half of what’s typical on residential streets in the older parts of Toronto.

Little wonder that people here think nothing of popping across the street to attach a little paper note to a neighbour’s front door.

That intimate sense of community was already in force when Kohut arrived on the street in the middle of the Depression, an 11-year-old transplanted with six siblings and her parents from rural Manitoba.

There were kids everywhere, the only scarcity being money. Family meals back then tended to be soup, milk and bread, and if you didn’t like that, there was always soup, milk and bread.

To the south,
the railway yards were home to freight cars, and the coal-powered locomotives meant that on laundry days, you had to check the wind’s direction before putting anything out on the line to dry, lest it get blackened with soot.

But the rail yards did have their attractions, not least the freight cars filled with produce. Kohut remembers how she and her siblings would head down there and the rail workers would give them any bananas that happened to fall out of their crates, bananas the kids would then take to Union Station and sell to passersby for a nickel apiece.

“Maybe we didn’t have things like other kids, but we were happy,” she says.

They’d spend hours playing in Fort York, climbing all over the cannons, and when it came time for the Canadian National Exhibition, they’d sneak in via the fort. “Naturally,” she says, “I had four brothers.”

Even then, neighbours shared things and gathered together for no particular reason. Later, it would be Polly Iwanyszyn from the variety store with plates of kolbasa, Kohut’s late husband, Bill, baking carrot cakes.

“We had some beautiful street parties,” says Kohut.

People who’d long since moved away would return for those. “All the kids came,” she says, adding a little wistfully that, with the passage of so much time, “half of them are gone now.”

At the south end of Draper, the view is about as arresting as possible. The rail yards are still there, packed these days with GO trains. But beyond that, there’s now a massive concrete wall and then huge condominiums, arrayed like glass mountains in full sun.

“Those, they go up to God’s country,” huffs Kohut. “They’re trying to beat the CN Tower.”

You’d be forgiven for wanting to recoil and scurry back up Draper, back to the green shade, the pretty red and yellow brick of another century, the whole touchable scale of life there.

“We all wonder who’s going to live in those little boxes,” Stephanie Kerr says of the condos springing up all around Draper.

They wonder, too,
about what will become of the lands to the east, now anchored by the Globe and Mail building, former home of the Toronto Telegram. Their hope is that something more akin to townhouses will ensue closest to Draper, more in keeping with the size of the Edwardian industrial buildings on Wellington, which have themselves been transformed into offices and toney lofts.

If anything, though, Kohut has seen much bigger changes to the east already, since it used to have a villa dating to 1842 that later became part of Loretto Abbey girls’ school, which in turn became a Jesuit seminary on whose grounds the boys of Draper used to play hockey, provided they swept the ice for the priests.

All that was razed in 1961 to make way for the Telegram building, and yet nothing ill really happened to Draper.

It just carried on as always — a little inward, maybe, looking contentedly in on itself no matter what happened around it.

People would come and go over the decades, and Draper’s charms would endure, perhaps because a street like that doesn’t really attract the sort of people who’d want to change it even if they could.

“Everybody is still as committed, even the renters, to just restoring the street,” says Kerr, likening it to one she remembers in Greenwich Village, New York, from her days as a drama student.

Not that Emma Goodall would know about that, or all the history on Draper, or at least not yet.

“I’ve got a lot to learn,” she says, being a “newbie” who only moved to the street a year ago.

There’d been an advertisement for a main-floor apartment near Front and Bathurst, and when it all sounded “too good to be true,” she and her partner just had to come for a look.

“When we walked down, we were sort of transported,” she says. “The street is like a little community. It was a lovely surprise.”

She had to miss her first street sale last spring, something she seems to regret more now than at the time.

But “I’m in and out of the little parkette,” she adds, having already made her own contribution of tomato plants and herbs.

And yes, she hopes to stay on Draper, as if she’s already absorbed one of Kohut’s favourite lines: “When I come here, I’m home.”

More on thestar.com

We value respectful and thoughtful discussion. Readers are encouraged to flag comments that fail to meet the standards outlined in our
Community Code of Conduct.
For further information, including our legal guidelines, please see our full website
Terms and Conditions.